REF 2020 open access rules not ‘scary’, forum hears

Mandler's claim that CC BY “propagandises for plagiarism” is wrong. CC BY licensing has nothing to do with plagiarism, which is regulated by scholarly norms, not copyright law. Is there any evidence at all to substantiate the assertion that open licensing increases plagiarism?

CC BY was devised initially to facilitate the 'mash-up' culture in the digital arts. It therefore fosters the creation of 'derivatives', in which elements of an original work are mixed up with other elements, which may be indistinguishable. The 'attribution' element requires only that the original work be acknowledged - e.g. it is sufficient to say that the derivative work is 'based on' the original work. This is exactly what we tell our students is plagiarism - when they mix their words with ours, without specifying which is which. (Even if they say in a footnote or a bibliography that they've based their new work on ours.) Neither scientists (who when given a choice frequently prefer a 'no derivatives' licence) nor, especially, humanities scholars are as happy to encourage this unattributed mixing as digital artists. I'm sure it's true that CC BY fosters some practices that we would all welcome, but the CC BY absolutists do no good to the cause of Open Access by insisting that it doesn't foster any bad practices. Creative Commons itself acknowledges that until recently it had little experience with arts and humanities scholarship, and it will take some time to sort out what kinds of licences are best to promote Open Access for different classes of work. In the meantime, as HEFCE has recognized, it's best not to commit ourselves to one particular licence just because that suited some digital artists and crusading scientists in the earlier phases of the Open Access movement. There is a lot to be settled still as to what exactly the various licences will and will not permit. For example, there is a lot of uncertainty about whether CC BY is or is not the best licence to enable data- and text-mining (and again people often make assertions about this based at best on guesswork and at worst on a poor understanding about what data- and text-mining even mean in a humanities work). I said all this to Tim Vollmer months ago. I know he gets cross when I use the word 'plagiarism', but humanities scholars get cross when they're told for no good reason that they *have* to accept one particular form of licence which is not necessary to put our work on Open Access. Let's focus on extending Open Access in ways that will encourage everyone to join in. For those interested in reading more about these debates, I refer you to the record of a seminar at which HSS learned societies, Wellcome, RCUK, HEFCE and CC were all represented, and at which a variety of views were cogently put: http://tinyurl.com/oyfcd4v .

You've left out the most important component of the HEFCE/REF mandate: that irrespective of whether the article is published in a subscription journal or a "gold" open access journal, and irrespective of whether the journal embargoes open access, the author's final, peer-reviewed draft must be deposited in the author's institutional repository immediately upon acceptance for publication -- NOT only after the elapse of any embargo. This is the crucial upgrade to the Finch/RCUK mandate provided by the HEFCE/REF immediate institutional deposit requirement (which is also the one recently recommended by the BIS Select Committee): Access to the deposit may be set as open or closed, but the deposit must be immediate, and institutional. The result is that all articles will be systematically deposited, there will be a date-stamp (the author's acceptance letter) against which immediate deposit can be verified, and this effectively recruits all UK institutions to monitor and ensure compliance with RCUK/HEFCE/REF -- a mechanism crucially missing from the Finch/RCUK mandate without the upgrade. It preserves authors' full freedom of choice as to whether to pay for gold or merely to provide green (whether or not embargoed). It also ensures that everything is deposited immediately, green or gold, embargoed or not. And as a special bonus, the HEFCE/REF immediate-deposit requirement provides the institutional repository's "Almost-OA" copy-request Button, with which any individual user can request and any author can provide individual access to a copy with one click each. This will tide over researcher access needs during any embargo for closed access deposits. See: http://j.mp/hefceREFoa